The historian Thomas Großbölting offers a panoramic view of the seismic shifts in the German religious landscape since 1945. Originally published in German in 2013 and stemming from his participation in the Excellenzcluster in religion and politics at the University of Münster, his account provides a masterful synthesis of the sprawling literature on postwar religious transformation. As its title promises, this book depicts the broad dechristianization of society. Religion, Großbölting argues, has been pushed to the margins: it is now possible for young Germans to come of age not only with no religious affiliation but also lacking the most rudimentary understanding of any faith tradition.

How did Germany go from being a society in which most self-identified as Christians, at least formally, to one in which religion plays little to no role in both private and public life? Großbölting eschews easy answers. He rejects the secularization theories in vogue in the 1960s, which posited an inevitable religious decline as society modernized and faith in rationality replaced religious belief. Yet he also does not accept alternative models proffered since the 1990s, which underscore the continued vitality of religious belief in “spiritual” movements, New Age religions, and even ostensibly secular pastimes such as bodybuilding and weight loss infused with religious vocabularies of sin and resurrection.

Instead, what emerges in Großbölting's account is a picture far more complicated and nuanced than the champions of models of religious “transformation” or dechristianization theses would have it. He begins by challenging the conventional wisdom about the religiosity of the immediate postwar era. For many church leaders as well as church critics in the 1950s and 1960s, this was an era of religious vitality following the unprecedented catastrophe of World War II and Nazi persecution of the churches. But Großbölting rightly turns this picture on its head. The hopes of church leaders to “rechristianize” Germany by bringing former Nazis back into the fold proved chimerical. The exodus of young persons from youth organizations in the late 1950s and 1960s additionally proved that church leaders had never succeeded in building a solid foundation for the future. In the German Democratic Republic, the state's measures to replace confirmation with the Jugendweihe or secular coming-of-age ceremonies led already by the late 1950s to a rapid decrease in religious influence on society. Protestant leaders, in particular, publicly opposed and attempted to defy these state encroachments into the religious sphere—and decisively lost.

In the West, the churches’ role in politics—the Catholic Church's in particular—emerged in some ways as the worst of all worlds. The church never proved as solid of a bulwark against the secularizing forces of liberalism and socialism as its champions had hoped; it was unable to realize many key parts of its ideological and religious agenda, such as state guarantees for denominational schools. But its role in politics was sufficiently robust that it generated a powerful backlash both from liberal and socialist political opponents and also from left-wing Catholic adversaries who a generation later were able to generate sufficient change within the institutional world of German Catholicism itself. Critics of confessionalization, clericalism, and Cold War politics were in the ascendancy by the 1960s and 1970s, and in turn heralded a greatly diminished clerical role in politics.

Großbölting's most effective analysis focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, an era of religious transformation that he, citing sociologist Ulrich Beck, describes as “historically without precedent” (128). Both Catholicism and Protestantism were riven by internal disagreements and divisions over questions of sexuality, the family, and models of liberation. Confessional distinctions between Catholics and Protestants began to recede in importance, even if the media were more apt to seize on the Catholic Church as a target. Equally significant was a change in religious beliefs, a transformation that the author sums up as one from “hellfire” to “all-embracing love” (167). At the same time, church attendance plummeted. Increasing numbers opted to forgo religious marriages and baptisms. Confessional schools shrank in numbers. Großbölting's account leaves open the questions of whether these changes in religious practice were the cause or the effect of broader changes both in theology and religious understandings. As he puts it: “As so often, there are no certain answers to these questions” (197).

Großbölting devotes the last third of his book to the present. Does religion still have a role to play in contemporary German society? He ultimately rejects the notion, prevalent among conservative pundits, that Islam is rising to fill the vacuum left by the loss of meaning in Christian beliefs and institutions. Although it is true that the number of Muslims in Germany has soared because of immigration, Islam has not achieved a cultural ascendancy in Germany, even if Muslims on the whole remain far more religiously active than Christians (244–45). Großbölting ultimately concludes that Christianity itself is not dead; rather, its specific social and cultural forms from the last 150 years have “come to an end” (293). The culprit was an ethos of “self-determination, self-affirmation and self-realization,” in which the individual came to act as his own yardstick and turned the search for meaning inward (296). Christian values, as important as they have been, thus have become but one set of values among many.

The German case, Großbölting nonetheless hints, might be an aberration. “The loss of heaven is not self-evidence, let alone ‘natural’” (292). In the United States “and many other parts of the world religions are on the advance” (292). Recent studies, however, like those carried out by the Pew Foundation, paint a different picture—one of American religious decline, particularly among millennials, and one that reflects the United States’ deepening political divisions.

All in all, Losing Heaven is a highly successful account of modern and contemporary religious developments, even if some details, particularly those pertaining to the first decades of this century, will no doubt need to be revised as ongoing events lead us to reassess the immediate past. Because most church archives are governed by a “forty-year rule,” documents from the 1970s and 1980s will become available to scholars in coming years, invariably leading to slight alterations in the picture painted here. The fact that this book has been widely reviewed in Germany's secular press and has now been made available in English translation speaks to its persuasive power. This wonderfully reflective work serves as a mirror of our present religious moment.